[TV] Little Britain Pulled from IPlayer

[sparkie]

Apparently the Beeb are now looking at 'other' programmes from their catalogue due to supposedly a large number of complaints in the last few days. Suspect that Porridge, Fool & Horses, It Ain't half hot mum and many many others will be removed from i player and associated services at this rate. Sad but on th back of the Little Britain removal it seems highly likely. Glad I have Porridge and Fools & Horses on dvd.

Well that would just be taking away much loved programs because we are not allowed to have them anymore

 

[wellquickwoody]

Gone With the Wind now being withdrawn by some noddy network as it is seen to be racist.

Hattie McDaniel appeared in the film and received the first Oscar to ever be won by a black woman

 

[Westdene Seagull]

Putting aside I didn't find Little Britain that funny I do think we're in danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Comedy is meant to test the boundaries and well as highlight the ridiculousness, and sometimes prejudice, of life. People need to watch comedy based on their desire to be offended. My parents would never watch Jim Jefferies - they'd be appalled if they did. I on the other hand find him very funny. Patrick Kielty outside his 'cheeky chappy' TV persona is very close to the line with his standup about the Irish situation.

Constantly voted the best Fawlty Towers episode by Germans ( yes Germans ! ) is ..... The Germans episode ! Equally many would be disgusted with the scene where Basil and The Major discuss The Major taking a lady friend to the cricket - I find it hilarious and very telling of that older generation in the 70s - so much so you end up thinking - "Shit, I wouldn't want to think like that.".

I don't have a problem with blacking up - David Williams and Matt Lucas are both white and couldn't have pulled off the sketch any other way. I wouldn't be offended if say Lenny Henry 'whited up' to do a sketch either if the point was around white people. That said the Black and White Minstrel Show I would object to.

So overall I think there is some kneejerk reaction here - there needs to be a little consideration of what the actual sketch is trying to poke fun at or highlight.



So I'm all for removing things that are truely offensive -

 

[Palacefinder General]

Gone With the Wind now being withdrawn by some noddy network as it is seen to be racist.

Hattie McDaniel appeared in the film and received the first Oscar to ever be won by a black woman

You really aren't the sharpest tool are you? Do you know anything about her, that film, the history and controversy surrounding it, and her role in it?

 

[Stat Brother]

You really aren't the sharpest tool are you? Do you know anything about her, that film, the history and controversy surrounding it, and her role in it?

Or the network in question, HBO.

You've got to wonder who is currently upset that they can't watch Gone With The Wind, today.

"Unbelievable I've waited 60 years to watch that film and they dropped it off the schedule just as I was microwaving my popcorn".

 

[southstandandy]

Done wonders for the Little Britain DVD sales. The box set now sold out on Amazon and prices rising on ebay!

 

[Iggle Piggle]

Apparently the Beeb are now looking at 'other' programmes from their catalogue due to supposedly a large number of complaints in the last few days. Suspect that Porridge, Fool & Horses, It Ain't half hot mum , Fawlty Towers and many many others will be removed from i player and associated services at this rate. Sad but on the back of the Little Britain removal it seems highly likely. Glad I have Porridge and Fools & Horses on dvd.

Some of the early Fools and Horses never make the light of day on Dave because of the content. Minder on ITV4 has the odd strange dubbing that is racist content. They have removed the obvious stuff from the Catalogue (It ain't half hot mum for example) but have put a lighter touch on the stuff like OFAH. I'm guessing that is easier to do as the same people popped up every week in Little Britain albeit I think people have missed the point to an extent. Walliams and Lucas normally were laughing at the white people such as the racist Auntie, Englishman who bought a Thai bride or the lecturing weight Watchers lead.


Some things age better than others. The Fast Show is as good now as it was then.

 

[wellquickwoody]

Or the network in question, HBO.

You've got to wonder who is currently upset that they can't watch Gone With The Wind, today.

"Unbelievable I've waited 60 years to watch that film and they dropped it off the schedule just as I was microwaving my popcorn".

I have actually no interest whatsoever in watching that film again, I did it years ago. I just find it ridiculous that an award winning piece of social history is being banished in an attempt to appear morally modern. It exists, it happened, do not forget, but never repeat.

 

[The Antikythera Mechanism]

The League of Gentlemen has now been pulled from Netflix because of “racist” Papa Lazarou. Crazy!

 

[Stat Brother]

I have actually no interest whatsoever in watching that film again, I did it years ago. I just find it ridiculous that an award winning piece of social history is being banished in an attempt to appear morally modern. It exists, it happened, do not forget, but never repeat.

But it's not been banished.
Now it is just too sensitive and raw to have such a film in their menu next to Sausage Party or something.


I would strongly recommend a 1980's/90's documentary on the making of GWTW, it was truly fascinating.

 

[Giraffe]

I really don't understand what the point of doing this is? Surely it about choice. I get that they might not want to show these at prime time in 2020, and indeed both Matt Lucas and David Walliams have said they would make them differently if they did them today, but why does that mean you can't still chose to watch them now?

Who are the BBC to be judge and jury over our culture. And where does that lead. It all feels very dangerous to me, and is increasingly becoming a country that is going down a strange media run culture. It doesn't feel right.

 

[Giraffe]

Gone With the Wind now being withdrawn by some noddy network as it is seen to be racist.

Hattie McDaniel appeared in the film and received the first Oscar to ever be won by a black woman

Just seen this. Astonishing. Why? I've watched that film several times, it was one of the first dates my parents had to go and see this at the cinema. As far I can see it portrays what actually happened at the time. I can't see an issue with any of it. I actually think it is quite educational for people who may not know about that time.

 

[Acker79]

Gone With the Wind now being withdrawn by some noddy network as it is seen to be racist.

Hattie McDaniel appeared in the film and received the first Oscar to ever be won by a black woman

The article I read covering this indicated it was a temporary removal to add some conversation around the, shall we say, slight historical inaccuracies about the way the film portrayed slavery, etc. That it will be back in a similar way to the looney tunes referenced earlier in the thread.




Personally, I'm largely indifferent to the removals. I think dismissing it as superfluous or virtue signalling is lazy. Much like humans, the structures in place in society and history are complex and nuanced. The influence of film and TV is immeasurable (not to say it is so big you can't measure it, but it is so complex you can't measure it) - there is an instinctive 'it's just TV/Movies, people aren't influenced by it' but they clearly are - language and culture are obviously impacted, look at how many people would say 'not' like they did in wayne's world, 're-e-e-eally' like in ace ventura or 'yeah baby' like austin powers. Jokes and lines from films stay with us and are repeated in variously appropriate situations. Fashions and technology. There's a reason advertising is such a massive industry - it works. There's a reason companies pay to get their products in films and tv, people see it and think 'that's cool'. A lot of us see the difference between quoting Mike Myers and copying Michael Myers. But where that line is between 'ok to copy' and 'not ok to copy' varies from person to person, culture to culture.

"It's comedy" doesn't stop it having harmful effects. If people are only exposed to caricatures, it seeps into their subconcious and creates a bias. If they see TV shows making fun of black people, trans people, gay people, or even deliberately exaggerated stereotypes of them, there is a sense that 'well if it was so bad, how can it be a prime time tv show, it must be ok for me to make the same jokes at an actual person'.

And Matt Lucas himself recognises that it isn't appropriate today. Speaking in 2017 he is quoted as saying

"If I could go back and do Little Britain again, I wouldn't make those jokes about transvestites. I wouldn't play black characters. Basically, I wouldn't make that show now. It would upset people," he explained.

"We made a more cruel kind of comedy than I'd do now. Society has moved on a lot since then, and my own views have evolved. There was no bad intent there – the only thing you could accuse us of was greed. We just wanted to show off about what a diverse bunch of people we could play."

Lucas added that he's become "more empathetic" as he's gotten older and he "cares more about hurting people".

https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/a839766/matt-lucas-little-britain-regret-criticism/

 

[Live by the sea]

Films and tv from a different era should be left alone so that people can watch if they wish . It is wrong to try to whitewash what happened in the past because of pressure from various groups .

Different things happened at different times , that’s life , get used to it .

What next , no war films because of what happened in WW2 and other wars .

Films and tv programmes are largely a product of when they are made , there is no reason to pull them because we live in different times now . Actually you could equally argue life is no better today , people might not call each other names but violent crime is worse now than in the previous 50 years so it doesn’t look like our PC culture has moved as forward as much as some people seem to think !

 

[Acker79]

Films and tv from a different era should be left alone so that people can watch if they wish . It is wrong to try to whitewash what happened in the past because of pressure from various groups .

Different things happened at different times , that’s life , get used to it .

What next , no war films because of what happened in WW2 and other wars .

Films and tv programmes are largely a product of when they are made , there is no reason to pull them because we live in different times now . Actually you could equally argue life is no better today , people might not call each other names but violent crime is worse now than in the previous 50 years so it doesn’t look like our PC culture has moved as forward as much as some people seem to think !

It's not been removed (even if it is temporary) because it's a film about the civil war, or a film about slavery. It's because of the inaccurate portrayal - the idea that the south weren't really fighting to keep slavery (when that was in many of the declarations of war), that the people fighting against slavery and in defence of a united states were the bad people, that slavery was a romantic idea and the slaves loved it.

The New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick has called for Gone with the Wind, the 1939 multi-Oscar-winning epic, to no longer be screened in cinemas.

“If the Confederate flag is finally going to be consigned to museums as an ugly symbol of racism,” writes Lumenick, “what about the beloved film offering the most iconic glimpse of that flag in American culture?”

The book, as well as the film, says Lumenick, “buys heavily into the idea that the civil war was a noble lost cause and casts Yankees and Yankee sympathisers as the villains”. It also, he writes, goes to “great lengths to enshrine the myth that the civil war wasn’t fought over slavery — an institution the film unabashedly romanticises”.

Lumenick speculates that many in the Academy likely feel the same way, noting that The Wizard of Oz – which was defeated as best picture by Gone with the Wind in 1940 – received a special 75th anniversary tribute. But during the same ceremony (in which 12 Years a Slave was ultimately named best picture) Gone with the Wind was all but ignored.

The critic concludes: “What does it say about us as a nation if we continue to embrace a movie that, in the final analysis, stands for many of the same things as the Confederate flag that flutters so dramatically over the dead and wounded soldiers at the Atlanta train station just before the intermission?”

https://www.theguardian.com/film/20...e-with-the-wind-should-be-banned-from-cinemas (from 2015)

What’s problematic about “Gone With the Wind” today?

John Beifuss: Just as it’s shocking to think back to that long ago time — OK, it was last month — when Americans would tolerate a Confederate flag flying over a state capital building, it’s rather depressing to note that most white viewers of “Gone With the Wind” have been entirely untroubled by the film’s assertion in its first 20 seconds (after the credits and overture) that this Southern plantation land of “Master and Slave” was in fact the “pretty world” where “Gallantry took its last bow.” In other words, “We didn’t treat them that way” (i.e., with cruelty), the wishy-washy Ashley asserts, when the entrepreneurial Scarlett O’Hara wonders why this former slave-owner objects to her use of unpaid chain-gang convicts as mill labor.

The movie contains surprisingly little explicitly offensive racial material (I’ll defend Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar-winning characterization of Mammy), but its whitewash of slavery — its suggestion that the true “Old South” was a place of happy “darkies” who benefitted from the gentle temperaments of their owners — popularized a myth that’s proved as hard to kill as a boll weevil. As Scarlett’s beloved father asserts early in the film, in defiance of “Yankee” objections: “We’ll keep our slaves, with or without their approval.”

Chris Herrington: I’d say that statement by Mr. O’Hara is an accurate depiction of planter class determination; the pertinent question is whether the film endorses it. And despite an interesting strain of criticism embodied at times by Rhett Butler, and despite a relative lack of the blatant, hysterical racism of the earlier sensation “The Birth of a Nation,” most of the film’s treatment of slavery and Civil War-era history is essentially a softened version of the deluded world view of pro-slavery writers and most Confederate leaders. And as historically good as McDaniel’s performance is, the film’s mere handful of black characters amounts to a glossary of racist film stereotypes. The film’s depiction of slaves as uniformly docile, loyal and well-treated would be comical if it weren’t still so unquestioned.

Early in the film, Mr. O’Hara tells Scarlett that “Land is the only thing worth fighting for,” and the film seems to echo this comforting bit of Lost Cause revisionism. As historian David Blight has noted, by 1860 “the nearly 4 million American slaves were worth some $3.5 billion, making them the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads combined.” You only have to read actual declarations of secession and prewar Confederate speeches and writing to know this property was absolutely deemed something worth fighting for.

https://eu.commercialappeal.com/sto...taking-stock-controversial-classic/603013001/ (orignally 2017 going by the url, but updated december 2019)

For it to be comparable for your ww2 film ban, we'd be banning films that suggest the Nazis were the good guys, and the Jewish people were desperate to go to Auschwitz.

 

[Deleted member 22389]

fing crazy.

 

[Sussexscots]

Pretty sure that Clark Gable insisted to Victor Fleming (Director) that all segregation on the set of GWTW be removed or he'd walk out. He was minded to boycott the Premiere because of the Jim Crow laws until Hattie McDaniel asked him to go.

 

[dejavuatbtn]

Lots of sticking stuff in cupboards and under carpets going on. It will erase the truth of what we were, lessons learned, how we got where we are and what we have become.
If we are not careful the result will be, in years to come, racism denial. I really don’t think that’s what anyone wants.

 

[Palacefinder General]

Pretty sure that Clark Gable insisted to Victor Fleming (Director) that all segregation on the set of GWTW be removed or he'd walk out. He was minded to boycott the Premiere because of the Jim Crow laws until Hattie McDaniel asked him to go.

I believe she was banned from all premieres, might be wrong, had to sit on a segregated blacks only table off to the side during the Oscars and denied entry to the Oscars after-party because it was held at a whites only nightclub.

 

[Palacefinder General]

fing crazy.

Really?